


Incomprehensible in the Light

by cassyl



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ghosts, F/F, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-09
Updated: 2014-10-09
Packaged: 2018-02-20 11:40:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2427329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cassyl/pseuds/cassyl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some people might find the lab creepy late at night, but Cosima enjoys the solitude . . . until she isn't quite alone anymore.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Incomprehensible in the Light

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Taste_of_Suburbia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Taste_of_Suburbia/gifts).



It’s no wonder all the undergraduate interns think the bio lab is haunted. Even in a world-class research program, there are still some corners of the department that are stuck in the ‘70s. With the faded hospital-green paint in the hallways and the flickering lights in the supply closet, the basement level might as well be the set of a schlocky B-movie. Peter Cushing as Van Helsing, that sort of thing. Some generically hot sorority blonde could come charging around the corner at any minute, screaming about a crazy guy in a hockey mask chasing after her.

But if she did, Cosima probably wouldn’t notice. She’s got her headphones turned up so loud that someone could be violently dismembered by an ax-wielding psychopath just outside the door and all she’d hear would be _Selected Ambient Works, Volume II_. 

She likes late nights in the lab for exactly this reason: she’s totally isolated down here, no distractions, no interruptions, just the science—just her alone in the almost-invisible world. 

But this—cells, molecules, DNA—is the only kind of invisible world Cosima believes in. She’s all for winding up the credulous baby interns, but she sets no store in ghost stories. She loves old black-and-white horror flicks, but she loves them for their mad inventors and weird science. She puts her faith in what she can see, in observable phenomena that can be measured and repeated. Why look over her shoulder for ghosts and ghouls, when what’s really scary is the living—what ordinary people are capable of.

So when she hears a noise around 2 AM and looks up to see the door to the lab creaking slowly open on its own, Cosima’s first though isn’t, _Call an exorcist!_ but, _Where’s the draft?_

Lifting off her headphones, she leaves her workstation to pull the door shut again. It’s only when she’s got her fingers on the handle that she notices a flicker of movement in the hallway.

“Hello?” she calls out, but whoever it was has already disappeared around the corner, so Cosima pulls the door to and gets back to work.

*

She doesn’t give the door and the figure in the hallway another thought until a few days later when she’s in the lab late again. It’s just past 2:00 when a noise from the hall pulls her attention away from her microscope.

There’s someone standing at the door, she realizes with a start, staring right in at her through the glass pane—a pale face with wide, dark eyes that are fixed on Cosima through the glass. When their eyes meet, Cosima feels a cold jolt go through her, and from the look of shock on the woman’s face, Cosima knows she feels it, too.

The next moment, the woman’s gone, and Cosima struggles to untangle herself from headphones so she can go after her.

By the time she extricates herself, the hallway is empty. And it’s then that she remembers the door swinging open the other night. Has someone been spying on her all this time? But why? Is someone trying to snake her research? Does she have a stalker?

“Not cool,” she says to the empty late-night hallway, and tries not to read the lights dimming and flickering around her as a sort of answer.

*

The next time the woman appears, Cosima almost runs into her coming back from the restroom. She’s standing there at the door to the lab, looking in through the glass pane, her back to the hallway. Cosima doesn’t recognize her by her frame or by her wild golden-blonde curls, but by the intensity of her attention as she stares into the lab.

“Can I help you?”

The woman looks up, shock written broad across her face, as though Cosima had electrocuted her instead of extended a (relatively) civil greeting. “You . . .” Her eyes cast about, searching Cosima up and down.

“I’m the one you’ve been creeping on the past couple weeks, yeah.”

The woman—who’s kind of gorgeous for a stalker, now that Cosima’s getting a good look at her—shakes her head, apparently rendered speechless by Cosima’s arrival. She seems so perplexed Cosima almost feels sorry for her. 

“I’m Cosima.”

“. . . Delphine,” the woman replies, as if by rote.

“Are you a student? I don’t think I’ve seen you around.”

Delphine apparently finds this a difficult question to answer. “I . . . ah, I was. A student. I used to be.”

“So there is life after graduation,” Cosima says. “Good to know.”

“Sort of,” Delphine replies, her gaze dropping to the ground.

Making conversation with Delphine is a strange sort of challenge, like talking to a beautiful sleepwalker. She still seems dazed, and Cosima’s beginning to wonder whether there isn’t something wrong. 

“Do you . . . want to get a coffee?” As soon as she’s said it, this sounds like a ludicrous idea. Yes, definitely offer to have coffee with the mysterious woman who’s been lurking around your lab. Brilliant thinking. “They just got one of those Keurig machines in the grad lounge—probably new since you graduated.”

Delphine is looking at her like she’s something marvelous and new. It’s unnerving, but also kind of oddly flattering.

“Or there’s tea,” Cosima adds, mostly to fill the silence, “if you object to wasteful single-serving coffee pods. I think I even saw some kind of herbal blend in the back of the cupboard—not my preferred kind of ‘herbal’, but not bad if you have a strict no-caffeine-after-midnight policy.”

Delphine gives her a look that is at once hopeful and almost sad. “I haven’t had tisane in such a long time.”

Which is how they wind up at one of the rickety tables in the grad lounge with two steaming mugs of floral-smelling tea between them. It’s surreal—sitting here, chatting with a woman she’s never met in the middle of the night—but there are worse ways to spend an evening.

“So what brings you back to campus?” Cosima asks as they wait for their tea to cool.

Delphine frowns. “I never left,” she says. “I—can’t leave.”

“Is it a visa thing?”

“No, I—” She seems to think better of what she was about to say, and Cosima wonders what it is she’s holding back. Not that she minds the quiet, mysterious type. Just adds to Delphine’s allure.

“Must be hard, not being able to go home. Especially in your case.”

“What is my 'case'?”

“Well, you know, being—”

“Being—?”

“An expat,” Cosima supplies. “Far from home and everything. I’m only from California and sometimes the Midwest feels like a completely different country.”

Delphine seems almost disappointed. “Oh. Yes.” Then her gaze flicks up to Cosima’s face, dark eyes searching. “It makes it easier, having some company.”

Cosima can feel the heat rise across her cheeks, but she doesn’t let her eyes drop from Delphine’s. “Glad I could be of some assistance. If there’s anything else I can do for you, just let me know.”

Across the table, Delphine is smiling at her, a small, wondering expression, like she can’t believe how lucky she got.

“How’s your tea?” Cosima asks, to distract herself from the warm tension unfurling in her chest.

“It’s good,” Delphine replies, though she hasn’t even tasted it.

*

After that, Delphine starts showing up regularly. Whenever Cosima is in the lab late, Delphine will appear at the door, always right after 2 AM, always peering in through the small window set into the door like she’s waiting to be invited in. And every time, Cosima sets aside her work and lets herself be drawn into the pale, radiant circle of Delphine’s company.

Sometimes they go for a walk around the deserted late-night campus, drifting down the footpaths from the light of one flickering lamppost to the next. Sometimes they just sit in the grad lounge and talk over cups of tea that Delphine never drinks. It doesn’t really matter what they do. Cosima always seems to have this light, simmering tension just under her lungs whenever Delphine is near. And Delphine laughs more than she did at first, the signs of tension and fatigue at the corners of her mouth and eyes softening day by day.

One evening, they sneak into the bio-chem library because Delphine seems shocked when Cosima suggests it and she can’t resist the stunned, delighted look Delphine gives her whenever she says or does something unexpected.

The library is beautiful at night, all long, cool shadows amongst the stacks, perfectly quiet. 

“I love the library like this—no undergrads playing their music too loud, no one jockeying for space at the tables. It's like we're the only two people in the world.”

Delphine’s smile is bittersweet. “Sort of lonely, don’t you think?”

“Not if you’re in good company.” Cosima can feel the space between them like an electrical field, and the inevitability of it hits her: she’s going to kiss Delphine now.

But when she leans forward, Delphine jerks back. “I’m not—”

“You’re not into women,” she says, wondering how she could have read this wrong.

Delphine shakes her head. “I don’t think I can—”

“It’s—fine,” Cosima says, not wanting to hear any more. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have assumed.”

After a moment’s silence, Delphine says, “It doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like to.”

Hope leaps up in Cosima’s chest, and she tries to restrain it, tries not to get ahead of herself. “You’d like to, but . . . ?”

It takes Delphine a long time to gather her thoughts. “I . . . haven’t been completely honest with you, Cosima.”

Cosima waits. She can see Delphine wants to tell her the truth, she just has to give her time to say it. In the silence that follows, she tries not to guess what Delphine will say: _I have a boyfriend_ , or _I was sent here to seduce you and steal your research_ , or—

“I’m dead.”

Cosima laughs. “Well, that’s not what I was expecting.”

“It’s true.”

“OK, Casper.”

Delphine blows out a frustrated breath. “How could I make this up? Something so absurd!”

“Next you’re going to tell me the lab was built on ancient burial grounds.”

Delphine gives her an uncomprehending look. “ _Comment_?”

“Of course you're not up on horror movies." She waits for Delphine to deliver the punchline, but she just stands there, waiting. "So you’re, what, a ghost?”

“ _Yes_ ,” Delphine says emphatically.

“I'm sorry, but how?”

Delphine sighs. “I was doing research, a post-doctoral fellowship, funded by this organization called the Dyad Institute. A sort of, how do you say, recruitment—they pay for my fellowship and once I am finished, I go work for them. _Bon_ , everything is good.

"But . . . there was an accident. It was their fault, one of their samples—” She shrugs, as if it’s not worth going into the details. “Anyway, I got sick and I died. Only I didn’t go away, or stop existing, or whatever I thought was supposed to happen when you die.” She laughs, a thin, hollow sound. “I’m just . . . still here. I can’t leave.”

Cosima thinks of the way lights seem to bend and fade when Delphine walks by, of the way she never drinks her tea, of the look of surprise when Cosima first addressed her. And it occurs to her that there’s no point in doubting this, however incredible it may seem. She believes in observable phenomena, and here Delphine is right in front of her. “So you’re really dead.”

“No one else has ever been able to see me in all this time.” 

Cosima imagines months—maybe years—spent isolated from everyone around her. She imagines Delphine wandering campus while the living passed her by without a second glance. It's not so different from what she's been doing, she realizes, sequestering herself down in the lab in the middle of the night so she doesn't have to talk to anyone, making acquaintances but never friends, sleeping with people but never staying until morning. Both of them have been living, in their own ways, right on the outside edge of the visible world. And yet, how could anyone see Delphine and fail to notice her? 

“Until you spoke to me in the hall that night,” Delphine says, “I thought I would always be alone.”

“Well,” Cosima says, “you’re not now.”

**Author's Note:**

> For Taste_of_Suburbia, who said, "I have this one strange headcanon ever since the Season 3 finale (appearing to Cosima when she thinks she's about to die), where Delphine is a ghost. Delphine could have always been a ghost or maybe somehow she died and then became one, but overall I would love to see her haunting Cosima." I hope this pushed the right buttons!
> 
> Title taken from a letter Galileo Galilei wrote to Johannes Kepler in 1569.


End file.
